56 . A RE-POR TE-R A T LAR GE- N EW YORK is a house of many mansions, with much going on in them, and the Puerto Rican migrants are spread through It all unevenly. Few of them attend first nights on Broadway or deal on the Stock Exchange, but great num- bers prepare the city's food, carry its messages, and play ball games in its parks. Great numhers of them, too, are well known to officialdom. Today, N e\\- York City has such a complex net of public services, woven to save its poor from the mishaps ot our times, that it may well be the world's most thoroughgoing wel- fare state, and, simply by being here, the Puerto Ricans are bene- ficiaries of these services. They have the same rights as an} other New Yorkers to the boons of the city world- public schooling, housing, doctoring, and so on-even if it is a world they did not make and may not understand. That world has trouble understand- ing them, too, and trouble fitting them in to its bureaucratic procedures. Even the names of Puerto Ricans can make for difficulties, since in Spanish the mother's maiden name is handed down to her children. Puerto Rico's Gover- nor, for instance, is named Luis Muñoz M " M - " b h . f h ' arIn, unoz eing IS at er s f . 1 d " M ,,, h . h ' amI r name an arin IS mot er s f _ I " M ",. h d b amI y name. arin IS attac e ut lightly to the rest. It isn't handed down to the next generation, and it Isn't used alone; the Governor is not Señor MarIn but Señor Muñoz This custom of put- ting the mother's maiden name Last has led to a good deal of confusion in New York City records, particularly right after the war; the migration was some- thing new then, and mainlanders were not ready for this pitfall, so It sometimes happened that families were listed under different names with different agencies, or even the same agency. Nor is that all. The more rustic migrants are apt to change their names at will. "Our coun- try people don't care much about names," a Puerto Ric2.n recently told me. "On the island, a boy will move to another village, and people will start calling him something else, and he will become that. Or maybe a baby's par- ents will give it a name, but then stay home on the day it is chnstened, and in THE. PUE.R TO RICANS IV-JOINING THE. STR.EAM :f church the godparents may get what the} feel is a better idea-the name of the saint whose day it is, perhaps. After that, the child has two names, and can change back and forth between them He doesn't care. He knows he's the same person eIther way." He is not the same person either way, however, to the city's punch-card machines. All in all, the task of medIating be- tween the Puerto Ricans and govern- ment red tape is a colossal one During the past few months, I have met scores of officials and social workers who deal with the Puerto Ricans here, and al- most all of them, I have found, spend a good part of their time eXplaining ad- ministrative procedures to the migrants. The more illiterate ones, it seems, just do not get the point of official paper- work; they see no significance or use in it, and in the circumstances this is often understandable. "Some of the forms the migrants have to fill out in order to get help are ridiculous," a Puerto Rican ::'0- cial worker has told me. "They ask a man all kinds of crazy things. To list all the assets he owns-or has ever owned. To lIst everything he derives income from-or has ever derived it from. Those questions are meaningless if a man has never owned anything but a hut he built himself from old boards He finds that if he start trying to an- swer, he is asked more and more ques- tions that he doesn't remember the answers to-if he ever knev{ them-so he learns to clam up and not tell the whole story. Of course, that's likely to hurt him badly-to ruin his chances of getting into a housing . " I h proJect, say. n ot er ways, too, the migrants' habits clash with the demands of red tape; many of their marriages, for example, are of the common- law variety, and they have an informal way of adopting chil- dren. In Puerto Rico, a waIf can usually count on finding a home simply through kind- ness. "There are lots of orphans there, but practically no orphan- ages," a Puerto Rican has re- marked to me. But New York frowns on such free-and-easy wavs, and has many legal safe- guards to protect children from adults; adoption here can be a delicate operation. The Puerto RIcans tend to think the safeguards are aimed chief! y at breaking up their happy homes, and this gives them one more reason for secretiveness. F or all their trouble with paperwork, the Puerto Ricdns, who make up seven per cent of the cit}'s population, get roughly twenty per cent of the city's total outlay In relief, or welfare, and one often hears that they come here with relief as their objective. Henry L. Mc- Carthy, the city's Commissioner of Welfare, denies this, however; he main- tains that they come here for jobs, and rarely get on relief in their first year. Furthermore, he points out, only eleven per cent of the Puerto Ricans here draw rehef, of one kind or another, while ten per cent of the city's mainland Ne- groes do. Since the Puerto Ricans who migrate to New York are usually young and able-bodied, few of them qualify for " Id . "" . d h d . o -age assIstance or al to t e IS- abled," but because of the size and na- ture of their families, they do often l ' f f " h 1 . f " d " . d qua 1 y or orne re Ie an al to dependent children," or A.D.C. Not uncommonly, a Puerto Rican household will include half a dozen little children, or more mouths than one low-wage breadwinner can feed, and then the as- sistance will be home relief. If there is no breadwinner at all, the household may be eligible for A.D.C., which gives mothers or other relatives the money for rearing fatherless children-an arrange- ment that is considered both cheaper and more humane than the orphanage system. As it happens, many women . . " ,rn J I ," --....;. .